I have always been interested in the way visual information is processed to control behaviour. I started working on the cerebral circuits involved in the learning and the control of visually guided reaching towards moving targets in cats. Since 1993 when I moved to Toulouse, I mainly focused on the fast visual processing of natural scenes in monkeys, humans and patients. Monkeys and Humans can be very fast at deciding whether a natural photograph flashed for only 20 ms contains an animal or not. This ability is linked with a differential brain activity between targets and distracters trials that develop from 150 ms after stimulus onset.
The fast motor responses observed in such tasks could rely on an coarse, unconscious object representation. We have accumulated evidence showing that such rapid visual processing should be massively parallel, essentially feed-forward and based on the first available visual information. But this coarse object representation built from early visual information might not be sufficient for all object categories. It has proved to allow the categorization of animals, human faces or means of transport, but additionnal processing time is needed for categorization at the basic level such as dogs or birds. We have also been interested in analysing and timing object/context interactions. Facilitation and interference between object and context processing have been evidenced as early as 160 ms after stimulus onset ! Very recently I became interested in very long term memory. How efficient is our memory to keep trace of briefly flashed scenes that have been processed repetitively in the past but not seen for years ?

Poncet M. & Fabre-Thorpe M. (2014) Stimulus duration and diversity do not reverse the advantage for superordinate representations : the animal is seen before the bird. European Journal of Neuroscience, doi:10.1111/EJN12513